Paul Allen on His Love for Old Computers

Paul Allen’s collections include Jimi Hendrix guitars and old World War II planes. He’s also been stocking up on the dinosaurs of computing.

He’s into 32-bit machines built by Interdata and the Imlac PDS-1, a programmable display system, considered to be one of the predecessors of the modern-day computer workstation. His search for these machines is the subject of an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Dionne Searcey / The Wall Street Journal

Old computer gear at the bare-bones museum. Allen’s team is planning to expand and upgrade the museum over the next two years.

Allen wants to stock his Living Computer Museum in Seattle with the old machines, some of which weigh 1,500 pounds or more. Many of those behemoths have less computer power than a modern-day mobile phone. He also wants to get them up and running. At the museum, for now a large room in a bare-bones warehouse, the machines hum and blink. Their magnetic reels and blocky typeface look like the stuff you’d find on a bad, old science fiction movie.

In the age of PCs, laptops and tablets, it might seem like an odd venture. But he cites nostalgia as part of his motivation. In his book, “Idea Man,” Allen fondly recalls a day when he was young and spotted a black PDP-10 mainframe from outside a computer center, calling it a “puppy in the window.”

Machines such as an old teletype “are very dear to my heart,” Mr. Allen said in a phone interview.

“They have a certain smell to them and a certain buzz when you hit the keys,” he said. “It sure takes me back to those days.”

The museum already has attracted a following by putting some of the old servers online so technology aficionados can play old-school, largely text-based games like Zork or otherwise access the old stuff, just for fun. Students and computer junkies stop by to view the collection by appointment.

“Today, in the palm of your hand, you can hold more computing power than is probably in that whole building,” Mr. Allen said. “It’s amazing how things have progressed. Those of us around in the early days spent a lot of time with these machines …and loved what we did. We have a real connection.”

Particularly near and dear to Mr. Allen is the Altair, the machine that used the first BASIC he and Bill Gates wrote that lead eventually to the founding of Microsoft.

“The Altair, I can remember like it was yesterday,” he said. “You have a connection to all those things. …As time goes on these things are going to become more and more museum icons. I think it’s fun and interesting to preserve that.”

He sees the museum as an educational tool for the Paul Allens of the future.

“We’re going to try to bring a lot of students through so they’ll get the sense of how things have proceeded so rapidly in the last 30 or 40 years from nobody having personal computers to now everybody’s got one of those.”